My organization needs to send marketing messages to a hundred+ listserves a few times a year. We used to BCC these from our personal email accounts, but we really just have to stop doing that. Does any one have experience treating listserves as leads in Marketo? Pros or Cons? Does anyone have other solutions for sending mass emails to listserves?

Sanford - when you say that if someone unsubscribes, they unsubscribe everyone...how would that work if they are BCCing people via Outlook? What if there is no unsubscribe link? I agree with your statement "not something I'd ever do," but would like a little more detail on the technical side!

Stephanie - By list serve do you just mean a purchased list? Have you seen good results with purchased lists and what is the driver of this strategy? My gut reaction is to say "never buy cold lists." Here's a good article I read the other day on this topic: Buying Contact Lists: A Bad Demand Generation Strategy

Sanford is correct. I'm talking about a group listserv and NOT a purchased list. In the past we have sent bulk emails where we BCCd all the listserves, however this can result in domain blacklisting should people report it as spam. This means we must now manually email each list serve one at a time without using a BCC. I was interested to know if anyone had figured out how to use Marketo for this, as it can be a time intensive process.

Providing an opt-out mechanism that will then affect everyone on the entire list.

Not providing an opt-out mechanism, which is illegal.

There's no way to avoid one of these. You certainly can send to listservs using Marketo, including an Unsubscribe link, where each list is a Marketo Person. But I would hardly find that sustainable. And that's not even thinking about the impossibility of tracking clicks.